Dachau survivor counts herself lucky

It’s not often that people remember events in their lives down to the exact minute, but Magdalena Hamilton is one of those people.

April 29, 1945, at exactly 6:10 p.m., is a moment that will live with her forever. It was day in which she thought she might die and a day on which she was liberated. She remembers a white flag flying from a giant doorway, and American troops as they rode through the gates at the Nazi concentration camp on the edge of Dachau, Germany.

She was 20 years old, a Roman Catholic from Hungary, and for nearly six months a prisoner at the oldest of the German camps that fostered the Holocaust. It’s nothing short of a miracle that she even survived.

“I saw so much death that eventually I no longer even believed in God,” Hamilton said. “I thought God would never let this happen. It took a very long time for me to go back to religion.”

She saw people begging for their lives outside the camp’s gas chamber and crematorium. She saw men digging their own graves before they were shot by German soldiers. She saw people tortured until they could no longer stand it.

The Holocaust Encyclopedia of the U.S. Holocaust Museum estimates that between 1940 and 1945, 28,000 people were killed at Dachau. As Americans neared that camp on liberation day they found thousands of bodies in various stages of decomposition stacked in more than 30 railroad cars.

Hamilton thinks the only reason she survived Dachau is because she speaks German and that she had finished four semesters of medical school before she was taken into custody. The Germans were desperate for people to treat their injured soldiers, she said.

Hamilton’s life since Dachau has been equally remarkable. She was sponsored by an American officer to come to this country in 1949. She did not speak English and never resumed medical school. But she eventually graduated from college with a degree in electronics and used it to make a very comfortable life for herself and her family. She and her husband raised eight children before they were divorced. Hamilton has had health issues in recent years but she’s going strong, she said, because her grandchildren still need her. Hamilton has lived in this area about 20 years.

She is now 88 and lives with a daughter in a very comfortable home in Murrieta. She describes herself as a patriotic American, a staunch defender of the middle class with American flags flying on both her front and back porches.

It’s obviously a long way from the nightmare that she knew in Dachau. She also considers herself very fortunate.

“I don’t feel bitter and I don’t hate the Germans,” Hamilton said. “But in those days once a human forgets to even be a human, they can’t even be called an animal. An animal will at least defend itself. There is nothing to describe the people who were in Dachau. No word even comes close.”

If you know of someone who would be interesting to feature in a column, call Jim Rothgeb at (951) 676-4315, ext. 2621, or email jim.rothgeb@californian.com.